The dead woman on my desk was me.
Not dead, technically. Just faded, thirty years older, and laughing at something just outside the frame as an unfamiliar hand caught her—my—waist. But the way the silver nitrate had bloomed around the edges of the print, like mold frozen mid‑breath, made her look halfway to a ghost.
"You�re creepy," I told her, because talking to photographs is less pathetic than talking to myself.
My voice sounded too loud in the narrow studio. Outside the windows, the city hummed—buses exhaling, traffic lights ticking through their colors—but in here, the only light was the cool wash from my monitor and the orange pinpricks of the drying cabinet. It smelled like old paper and fixer, with the faint metallic tang that clung to my skin no matter how long I scrubbed.
I leaned closer. The woman in the photo had my jawline, the same stubborn tilt that never quite relaxed, and my too‑wide mouth. Lines feathered at the corners of her eyes, giving her expression a softness I didnt recognize.
I didnt know the man attached to the hand on her waist. The image cut him off at the shoulder, just a slice of dark shirt and tendon, but the possessiveness in that grip made my neck prickle.
Future‑dated. The stamp on the back said 2053.
"Impossible," I muttered, but the date sat there, ink pressed deep into the fiber. Whoever had stamped it had meant it to last.
I set the print down, carefully, like it might shatter, and picked up the next from the stack the courier had dropped off an hour ago. Same woman—older me—but this time she faced the camera directly, head thrown back, teeth bared in a laugh so free it hurt to look at. A man stood behind her, arms banded around her from the front like he was daring the entire world to try and take her.
He wasnt the same man as the first photo. Wider shoulders. Different wristwatch. Different shadows in the grain. And his hand, where it rested over her heart, bore a pale, twisted scar that cut across the back like a lightning fork.
My stomach knotted.
The order slip clipped to the envelope had been ordinary enough—"Restoration. Private collection." No name. Just a PO box. That wasnt unusual. People with money and secrets liked distance. What was unusual was the way my pulse had started skating the second Id opened the package, like my body knew something my brain refused to process.
I flipped through the pile again, faster now. Ten photos. Ten men. Ten versions of me. The dates marched forward in uneven increments, all of them years I hadnt lived yet.
I was twenty‑six. Not laughing. Not wrapped in anyones arms. My world began and ended with this studio, a rent‑controlled apartment three blocks away, and the tiny coffee shop that didnt ask questions when I ordered the same thing every morning.
Nothing in my life made space for this.
Cold brushed the back of my neck. I rubbed at it, fingers catching on the loose knot of my hair. The skin there felt over‑sensitive, like someone had breathed too close without touching.
"Youre imagining things," I told myself. It didnt help that my voice shook.
The bell over the front door jangled.
